Miller Magazine Issue: 152 August 2022

64 COVER STORY MILLER / AUGUST 2022 tion. Digital tools already provide food producers with timely insights and services that support improvements in agricultural productivity and profitability. Across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the number of digital agricultural services (such as digital advisory services, digital procurement, e-com- merce, digital finance, and smart farming services) increased rapidly during the past decade, from 53 reported in 2009 to 713 in 2019, with beneficial impacts. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, meta-analysis studies show that producers who ad- opted digital extension and financial services increased their incomes by 20 to 40 percent and their adoption of recom- mended agrochemical inputs by 22 percent. Digital technologies can be a particularly powerful, inno- vative tool for managing climate risks across food systems — from producers to markets and value-chain services to policymakers. As weather patterns become more variable at the farm level, producers can use digital technologies to access localized weather and climate information services in order to optimize farm management decisions, such as irrigation scheduling and crop variety selection. Digital ex- tension services help small-scale producers to communi- cate with experts, who can diagnose farm-specific problems and prescribe best-bet climate-smart practices. Weather index-based crop and livestock insurance schemes, which assess climate-induced losses remotely and provide pay- outs through digital financial services, offer producers an increasingly important option for managing climate risk. By using data from mobile phones and satellite remote-sensing, these digitally enabled insurance products can estimate agri- cultural losses faster and at a lower cost and can make timely payouts for losses. All along food supply chains, the postharvest use of in- ternet-connected smart sensors, such as time-temperature indicators (TTIs) and tech-enabled traceability devices, allow value-chain actors to detect potential food safety and quali- ty issues (such as the prolonged exposure of dairy products to high temperatures during transportation) and thus reduce health risks and postharvest losses. Digital innovations for val- ue-chain services — financial services, credit, and insurance — can reduce transaction costs, address information asym- metries in traditional markets, and make crop insurance and digital finance more affordable and inclusive. For public sec- tor agencies and government entities, real-time food systems that monitor data collected, analyzed, and disseminated using digital technologies can improve early warning systems and help policymakers to make informed decisions to prepare for and mitigate risks. Digital innovations in forecasting can support climate sci- ence with information on weather, climate variability, and climate change, and can play a vital role in supporting food system resilience to worsening weather extremes. For exam- ple, every month, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts releases a seven-month global forecast of